Lucrecia Martel’s beguilingly sensuous dramas have depicted her country’s class and racial fissures in numerous ways, whether historically (Zama), psychologically (The Headless Woman), or in the form of a summer vacation flick (La Ciénaga) so languid and sultry, you could almost feel the sweat dripping off the celluloid.

But the gifted Argentinian auteur has never tackled the issue as directly as in Landmarks (Nuestra Tierra), a searing and detailed chronicle of murder, bigotry and robbery on a massive scale that also marks the director’s first feature-length documentary.  

Premiering out of competition in Venice, Martel’s two-hour investigation is at once the anatomy of a killing and its subsequent trial, and a comprehensive portrait of an indigenous community that has suffered from centuries of injustice. It’s also — and this is rare for what’s essentially a true crime doc — filled with flashes of visual splendor, as the camera rises to a bird’s eye view to reveal the scope of the land in question, reminding us that what’s at stake is not only an entire people’s culture, but nature itself.

The trial, which took place back in 2018, involved a dispute between members of the Chuschagasta community in northwest Argentina and a trio of white landowners who laid claim to their property. During a visit in 2009 to survey for mining possibilities, an argument devolved into a violent scuffle in which one man — Javier Chocobar, who was a Chuschagasta figurehead — was shot dead, while two others were gravely wounded.

The entire incident was captured on video, which would seemingly make a verdict easy to come by. But as the film goes on to detail through numerous testimonies recounted in voiceover, as well as archival footage, family photos and a full account of the courtroom drama, the gunshot that killed Chocobar was the culmination of a long, cruel process that saw the Chuschagasta deprived of their land and livelihood over time — a process carried out by, or with the full approval of, the Argentinian state.

Nobody in Landmarks uses the term “systemic racism,” but that’s precisely what we see happen not only in the various events leading up to the murder, but during the trial whenever the landowners — or their grating attorneys — justify their actions as self-defense. The three assailants (businessman Darío Amín and ex-cops Humberto Gómez and Eduoardo José Valdivieso) explain how they purchased the property legally and made efforts to discuss this with the Chuschagasta. But as one member of the community explains, “dialogue means giving up something, which means giving up a part of our land.”

Martel painstakingly documents how the land theft dates back at least to the last century, if not earlier, which means the deed claimed by Amín and his cohorts is bogus — not necessarily under current Argentinian law, but in the eyes of the indigenous people who were robbed in the first place. Restricted to a shrunken zone in the Tucumán province, where most of Martel’s fictional works are also set, the Chuschagasta are forced to live in tiny settlements surrounded by miles of breathtaking landscapes they no longer possess.

We get to know those landscapes inside and out, and especially from above whenever cinematographer Ernesto De Carvalho employs drones to convey the beauty and sweep of the territory. This includes an opening sequence that begins all the way up in outer space and then slowly hones in on Tucumán, highlighting how a single battle over one tract of land represents, in cultural and historical terms, a battle over the entire planet.

But the documentary mostly remains at ground level, focusing on the past and present lives of indigenous people forced to adapt to the many changes imposed on them by their government, until they tried to take a stand and paid the price for it.

Martel scrupulously captures that stand all the way until the end of a trial, whose verdict, as we learn in the closing credits, proves to be a bitter victory for the Chuschagasta. Landmarks may be the director’s first work of non-fiction — and an impressive one at that — but it extends a major underlying theme of her previous movies, highlighting deep social fractures within Argentina that can never be fully mended.